Retail stores and warehouses receive often receive multiple shipments of products each day. While some receiving locations can accommodate shipments via boat, airplane, or rail, shipments generally arrive via truck or other road based vehicle. Particularly in retail environments, any given shipment may contain a heterogeneous mix of goods, which need to be routed to a variety of destinations within a store. For example, a single shipment may contain baseball bats and footballs, to be routed to a sporting goods aisle, as well as children's clothing, or electronics. In addition, certain products within a shipment may be immediately required to fill empty shelves, while others may need to be sent to a storage location to prepare for a future need.
In order to minimize labor and effort required to move cases of product from the truck or other shipment vehicle or container, cases of products are often loaded onto a conveyor system. In order to efficiently receive products into inventory from a shipment, automated scanning devices can be used to detect a label, bar code, radio frequency identifier (RFID) tag, or other identifying feature of each case can be used.
The accuracy of scanners can be reduced by the presence of multiple items within a scanning area of a conveyor. Therefore, gapping (also known as separation or singulation) must be performed to provide a minimum distance between conveyed items. While gapping can be performed manually as conveyors are loaded, this can lead to inefficiencies, as humans are often not successful in maintaining ideal gap distances. Conveyor systems that can provide automatic singulation of items exist but conventionally are limited to large and permanent installations.
In retail environments or other situations where space is at a premium, it may be necessary to setup and tear down conveyor systems for the receipt of shipments multiple times daily. In addition, such environments often cannot provide the power requirements needed by larger conveyor systems.
What is needed in the industry, therefore, is a conveyor system that can operate in low-power, temporary environments to reliably singulate goods for efficient scanning.